This blog is a great opportunity to share ideas about ways to
transform schooling as we know it, to help all students realise their
talents, passions and dreams. Be great to hear from anyone out there! Feel free to add a comment to Bruce's Blog and enter e-mail to receive postings

‘Autistic people (and others with developmental disabilities) have
been fighting a war for decades. It's a war against being forcibly, often
brutally, conditioned to behave more like neurotypicals, no matter the cost to
our own comfort, safety, and sanity. And those of us who need to stim in order
to concentrate (usually by performing small, repetitive behaviors like, oh I
don't know, spinning something) have endured decades of "Quiet Hands"
protocols, of being sent to the principal's office for fidgeting, of being told
"put that down/stop that and pay attention!," when we are in fact
doing the very thing that allows us to pay attention instead of being horribly
distracted by a million other discomforts such as buzzing lights and scratchy
clothing.’

‘I have a dream that this nation will achieve its full creative and
economic potential and that Arts

education will rightfully be seen as central
to making this happen. It worries me that current thinking and policymaking
around national innovation concentrates on increasing participation in STEM
(science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects while the teaching
of the Arts (dance, drama, music, media arts and visual arts,) is rarely even
on the innovation agenda.’

‘Seeing all this, would a modern Rip van Winkle even send his kids
to school? Or would he see school as helplessly behind the times and opt for a
radically different path to give his children the education they actually
needed to thrive in the modern world?’

‘We know that our little ones walk and talk on their own timetables.
No rewards or punishments are necessary to “teach” them. Yet children are
expected to read, write and spell starting at five and six years old as if they
develop the same way at the same time. Academics are pushed on young

children
with the assumption this will make them better students. This approach is not
only unnecessary, it may be contributing to problems such as learning
disorders, attention deficits, and long term stress.’

‘In order for
educational settings to be successful they need to be aligned with how children
naturally learn. Children’s innate curiosity, enthusiasm, creativity,
playfulness, individuality, imaginativeness, resourcefulness, social
intelligence, and love of learning need to be respected and supported.This isn’t
rocket science, it’s just basic wise parenting and effective teaching. Most of
us have helped children develop skills and learn informally, before they went
off to school. And all of us mastered skills on our own, so this is something
we understand intuitively.’

‘In education
there’s a lot of talk about standards, curriculum, and assessment—but when we
ask adults what they remember about their education, decades after they’ve left
school, the answers are always about their best teachers. So what is it about
great educators that leaves such an indelible impression?’

‘Teachers will
always need to use their knowledge of students and content to make professional
judgments about classroom practice. However, we believe the art of teaching
should also be informed by a robust understanding of the learning sciences so
that teachers can align their decisions with our profession's best
understanding of how students learn. Unfortunately, our education system is
rife with misconceptions and confusion about learning. So let's clear away the
myths and focus on well-established cognitive principles and their implications
for the classroom:’

‘There is a
tendency to dismiss handwriting as a nonessential skill, even though
researchers have

warned that learning to write may be the key to, well,
learning to write.

And beyond the
emotional connection adults may feel to the way we learned to write, there is a
growing body of research on what the normally developing brain learns by
forming letters on the page, in printed or manuscript format as well as in
cursive.’

‘Those with their minds firmly fixed in a
patronising, mechanistic, or technocratic approach, always see measurement as
the ultimate way of guaranteeing progress.Like any simple solution to a complex
problem it is wrong -and has been proved so. Standard based teaching was the
approach of education in Victorian times - each class was called a standard (
standard one etc) that you progressed to if you passed the test. In the early
days, in the UK, teachers were paid by results their students gained in the
tests. Maybe that is next on our 'new' governments agenda.’http://bit.ly/2rW9kHM

Cathy Wylie outlines new wave of change for New Zealand Schools!

‘In 1989 an ‘earthquake’ hit education in the form of ‘Tomorrows
Schools’.Now, almost three decades later, A NZCER chief
researcher Cathy Wylie has written a definitive and compelling story of school
self-management .Cathy answers the questions: What was the real effect of ‘Tomorrows
Schools’? Has the New Zealand Schools system improved as a result? And what
changes are needed now to meet our expectations of schools?’

‘I wonder what would happen if all the expert’s curriculums
disappeared; and all the standardized tests? And, with them, all the
technocrats who believe that everything needs to measured and turned into data.
Anyway such people never bothered to measure anything important such as,
curiosity, love of learning and persistence; the very things that mark out
successful innovative individuals Instead consider what would happen if we
decided to create entire curriculums from student question and concerns?’